The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (15 page)

Nothing moved.

Outside the bedroom windows I could see the backyard
— about twenty feet of grass, a barbecue pit, swing set, pecan
tree. In the corner a wooden garage was topped with a second-story
apartment. The day was sunny, but it felt miles away outside the
gloom and the powder and the dust.

"Miguel!" Paloma called again.

This time sheets rustled in the corner. A little
spherical dent appeared in them, slid toward the entrance, then
emerged at the opening as the head of a five-year-old boy.

If I had not known he was half Latino, I never
would've guessed it. His skin was paler than mine, paler than damn
near anybody's. His eyes were blue like Aaron Brandon's, his hair
reddish like his mother's.

He was wearing a T-shirt and underwear and nothing
else. He peered up at me with mild curiosity.

"Miguel," Paloma said, "this is Senor
Navarre. Senor Navarre is a college teacher like your papa."

Michael seemed to be trying to reach some conclusion
about my face, as if he weren't quite sure if it was real or a pretty
good mask.

"Hey, Michael," I said.

"This is my cave," he informed me.

"I can see that. It's a real nice cave."

Michael suddenly developed a keen interest in picking
the skin off his knuckle.

"He needs to clean it up," Paloma grumbled,
but not like she expected any action.

"What's with the powder?" I asked.

"It's fog," Michael said to his knuckle.
"Makes you invisible."

"That's good," I said. "But just in
case they get through, you zap them, right?"

He snatched his ray gun, gave me an upward glance.

Paloma receded in the doorway and gestured for me to
follow. I told Michael I'd see him around.

The last I saw of him he was digging the muzzle of
his ray gun into his bare knee.

"This," Paloma said, "is normal."

It took me a few steps before I could speak. "Since
his father's death?"

"Before. Since the fights. Now will you go?"

We stopped in the living room, Paloma once again
holding the front door open for me. Her face seemed even more
compressed, her eyes almost slits, her mouth flattened into a hard
amber line. The irreverently stretched Holy Father smiled up at me
from Paloma's shirt, one papal eye bigger than the other.

"I'll go," I promised. "But the
apartment in back, above the garage — is that yours?"

She stiffened.

"You were the witness — the one who ID'ed Zeta
Sanchez for the police."

"Madre de Dios, if you don't leave now—"

I didn't make her finish the threat. I said good-bye
and went out to my car. When I looked back, Paloma stood motionless
in the doorway — her eyes dark, her face hard and impassive, as if
she'd turned back into red Texas granite. I couldn't blame her for
that. Anything as soft as human flesh could never have supported the
weight of the Brandon household.
 

SIXTEEN

Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention.
Sometimes necessity is just a mother.

All the way back to the University, I brainstormed
ideas for the graduate seminar, knowing I would have just enough time
to stumble into the classroom with none of Brandon's backlogged
papers graded and no prepared lecture notes. I kept trying to come up
with some brilliant game plan to make a good first impression. At ten
past one, sitting on a table in front of eight graduate students in
HSS 2.0.22, I was still without that plan.

"So." I tried to sound enthusiastic. "I
thought we'd start by going around — tell me your names, a little
about yourselves. Ask whatever you want about me.

Who wants to start?"

No hands shot into the air.

I waved encouragingly toward a couple of mid-fiftyish
women by the door. They were crocheting from a shared bag of pink
yarn.

"You ladies?"

They introduced themselves as Edie and Marfa, escaped
housewives. Marfa told me she wanted to read some medieval romances.
Edie smiled and gave me the eye.

"Ah-ha," I said. "And you, sir?"

The elderly man cleared his throat. He wore a
mechanic's jumpsuit and a buzz cut. "Sergeant Irwin, USAF,
retired. I'm still in this class because the military is paying every
penny, and so far I'm damn glad of it."

I thanked him for sharing, then waved toward the next
man — a young Anglo in a Men's Wearhouse Italian suit.

He looked up from his organizer long enough to say,
"Brian. I run a small carpeting business and I'm probably going
to drop the class. Don't mind me."

Behind Brian was Gregory, the giant radish mail boy
who delivered pipe bombs.

"Always nice to see a familiar face," I
told him.

Gregory mumbled something. He didn't meet my eyes.

Next to him sat two guys in Nirvana T-shirts and
jeans and plentiful chains clipped to their belt loops. Simon and
Blake. They asked me how it was hanging. I asked them how they'd come
to choose a medieval literature class and they shrugged and grinned
like Class? We're in class?

The last student, in the far corner by the window,
mumbled hello but didn't give a name or any other firm indication of
gender. He/she looked like a Morticia Addams drag queen.

"Great." I looked at the clock. We'd
managed to burn four whole minutes. "So — any questions?"

After some awkward silence and pencil fumbling, one
of the grunge guys, Blake, raised his hand and asked about class
hours. Would he still receive full credit for the first three months
of the semester even though What's-his-name had gotten bumped off?

"Yes," I said. "Full credit, even from
What's-his-name."

That emboldened the others.

Morticia asked if their essays had ever been graded.
I said that most of them had been salvaged from the bomb blast and
were currently on my desk. They'd be graded soon.

Marfa lowered her knitting needles and asked Brian
the carpet salesman if he'd really be able to drop the course. Wasn't
it too late in the semester? Brian told her she would need special
permission from the dean's office, but he was pretty sure she could
get it if she raised enough hell. Marfa looked at me to see if that
was true.

I tried to look sympathetic. I wrote down the
question on my notepad. "I'll find out. Something else?"

Simon, the second grunge boy, raised his hand and
complained that Dr. Brandon had been, well, a psychopath, and was I
one too?

Gregory the mail boy broke in. "I liked those
stories."

Morticia groaned. "Oh, man, you're nuts. I was
all like — I don't want to know how it feels to be impaled, okay?"

I wrote on my notepad, NO IMPALING. "You're
talking about the Crusade narratives?"

Several heads nodded. Edie informed me that Dr.
Brandon had been obsessed with violence. More heads nodded.

Sergeant Irwin, USAF, retired, raised his hand. "The
Marie de France stories. We bought this whole book and only read one.
Some of the others aren't quite so, well, offensive. Maybe we could
read them."

Edie agreed. She wanted to know if there were some
romances in the book, some without werewolves.

"I liked that one," complained Gregory.

Edie and Morticia started to argue with him.

Blake hollered, "Come on, man! It's this guy's
first day and stuff."

The grumbling died down. Morticia and Gregory and
Edie kept glaring at each other. Marfa was giving me the eye now,
wiggling her eyebrows in time with her knitting needles.

"Great," I said again. We'd now ripped
through twelve minutes. "I noticed the old syllabus was a little
heavy on the gore. Maybe the Marie de France book would be a good
place for a fresh start. How about the first three lais for Friday?
We'll revisit Bisclavret and move to Lanval and Guigemar."

There was some general mumbled assent.

That gave me an opening to lecture a little bit about
Marie de France, about the courtly love debate and the Anglo-Norman
world. I kept stopping to ask if my students had heard all this
before. They looked amazed. A few of them even bothered taking notes.

I was just wrapping things up when George Berton came
in, dressed in his usual sixties leisure clothes and Panama hat. He
held Jem by one hand and an enormously full brown paper bag in the
other.

I kept lecturing about the difficulties of
translating Anglo-Norman alliteration. George and Jem tiptoed around
the back of the room and quietly took two desks next to Gregory. Jem
waved at me, then pulled a new action figurine out of his OshKosh
overalls and held it up for me to see.

George looked at me seriously and pantomimed
straightening a tie. My hand started to go up to my collar, then I
stopped myself. George grinned.

"Well," I concluded. "That's probably
enough for the first day. We'll look at those first three lais on
Friday. I'll keep the same office hours as Dr. Brandon. Anything
else?"

Edie the housewife raised her hand. "I read in
the newspaper yesterday—"

"About the bomb blast," I interrupted.
"Thank you, but I'm fine."

"No..." She frowned, as if my assumption
that she'd been interested in my welfare had confused her. "I
just wanted to ask, is it true you're a private investigator?"

I looked back at George, who was slicing his hand
horizontally across his throat, mouthing: No. No.

"It's true," I said.

The class shifted in their seats. Nobody followed up
with questions. Nobody asked my trench coat size.

"Well—" I said. "Okay then. See you
Friday."

At that, Jem put down his action figure and began
clapping for me. The students looked back uneasily and began
collecting their things. Jem kept clapping until the room was empty
except for him, me, and George. George grinned. "Bravo,
Professor."

"What are you guys—"

George held up his bulging paper bag. "Join us
for lunch?"
 

SEVENTEEN

"You want the special or the beef?"

The question was a mere formality. George nudged the
Rolando's Special my way, grabbed the came guisada for himself, then
leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankles.

He unwrapped the end of the mega-taco and took a
bite, staring thoughtfully across the UTSA patillo.

The white patio tables were abandoned this late in
the afternoon, the sunken courtyard quiet except for the flutter of
pigeons and the sound of the stone monolith fountain sluicing water
off its slanted top into the pool below.

Overhead, reflected light from the water pulsed
across limestone pillars, up the two-story roof of opaque plastic
bubbles. Lines of wooden slats hung from above like weird, Mondrian
stalactites.

According to UTSA folklore, the campus had been laid
out following an ancient Aztec city design, which put the patillo in
the center of the community and the fountain right where the altar
would've been. Jem, who had already taken two bites of his kid's taco
and pronounced himself full, was now tightrope-walking his Captain
Chaos doll around the rim of the pool, right about where the bloody
heads of the sacrificial victims would've rolled.

I looked down at my Rolando's Special — a giant
flour tortilla stuffed with eggs, guacamole, potato, bacon, cheese,
and salsa. Normally it would have been enough to elevate me into Taco
Nirvana. Today, all I could think about were sheet caves, the
desolate interior of the Brandon home, and the things George Berton
wasn't saying.

He'd offered no comment on my morning's activities.
Without expression, he read the short article I'd found in Aaron
Brandon's desk about the IRS investigation in West Texas, then tucked
it into his olive-green shirt pocket along with his cigars. He'd been
animated enough talking about my classroom performance, the virtues
of Rolando's, the great things Jem had been making with his
Tinkertoys, but when the conversation had turned toward the Brandon
case, George had closed up.

Not that George didn't sometimes close up about his
cases-in-progress. Every investigator does. But after our free
conversation last night, his remoteness today made me uneasy.

"The IRS article," I prompted. "Mean
anything to you?"

"You mean like was Aaron Brandon interested in
drill bits?"

"No, doofus. I mean like was Aaron Brandon
getting ideas about turning his brother Del in to the IRS. If so, and
if Del found out about it, Del might've wanted to stop him."

"I don't know."

"Okay," I said. "Hector Mara. What
about him?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"I talked to some people, heard pretty much the
same thing Ralph told you. Mara's been doing business with Chich
Gutierrez — maybe running some heroin, though nobody could tell me
exactly how or where or to whom. Maybe Zeta Sanchez coming back would
cramp Mara's style. Maybe it would cut into Chich Gutierrez's
business. Doesn't necessarily mean Hector and Chich would set Sanchez
up for a murder."